


The Opposite of Amnesia

by scarredsodeep



Category: Fall Out Boy
Genre: Christmas, Christmas Fluff, Guilt, Head Injury, Hospitals, Love Confessions, M/M, Tales from 2003, Temporary Amnesia, Van Days
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-20
Updated: 2017-12-20
Packaged: 2019-02-17 12:30:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13076916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scarredsodeep/pseuds/scarredsodeep
Summary: A decorating accident lands the boys in the E.R. a few days before Christmas.





	The Opposite of Amnesia

Patrick is supposed to be holding the ladder.

Pete and Andy are roughhousing, trying to rub snow in each other's faces and shove handfuls of it down each other's pants. Pete's parka is half over his head, his belly ice-flecked and chapped red from cold, the dictionary definition of _exposed_. He is laughing, his cheeks flushed, as he shoves Andy back and then lunges, his mittens chunky with snow. Andy falls and Pete lands on top of him, his head thrown back in triumph, and he laughs into the night and he is so, so lovely, the naked inches of his back and the soft slip of _hip_  drawing Patrick's eyes like they're magnetized—

Patrick is supposed to be holding the ladder, and Patrick is distracted.

It's icy. The idea to put Christmas lights on the roof rack of the van, at night in the cold and the ice, was not their finest plan. But they had lights leftover after they decorated the apartment; Pete mysteriously obtained an illegal tree; Christmas carols were blaring; there was talk of holiday parties and elaborate schemes involving girls and mistletoe. They were all feeling giddy, festive. It seemed like a good idea, is the point. At the time.

Then the ladder slips, and Patrick isn’t looking, and Joe shifts his weight into his toes, and the whole contraption comes down. Joe comes down. He doesn't land on the soft snow, he lands on the unyielding pavement. He strikes his head with an audible crack.

Joe insists on plugging the Christmas lights into the DC adapter, "just like an ambulance," while Patrick drives them to the hospital.

*

In the E.R., Joe alternates between complaining about the “pinchy lights, throbbing noise, and vomitous mouthfeel” and singing brightly, badly along to the Christmas music piping in through the waiting room’s speakers. Playing Christmas carols at this site of bloodshed and dismemberment seems sadistic to Pete. He will never hear the aggressive hype of _Wonderful Christmastime_ the same way again.

Joe also keeps pulling his hood down over his eyes and trying to go to sleep. The only thing he’s _not_ doing, really, is filling out the intake forms. “The boxes are jumping,” he says when Patrick hands him the pen he’s dropped for the sixth time.

Finally, Andy takes the forms. He fills in as much as he can. “What’s your social security number?” he asks Joe.

Joe squints like Andy’s asked him to do an eye exam. “Twelve,” he says finally.

“Twelve,” Andy repeats, staring at him.

The hood goes back over Joe’s eyes. “They’ll know the rest,” he says vaguely.

Pete isn’t a doctor, but this seems like a bad sign.

*

Even though Joe’s the one waiting for a medical exam, Patrick’s the one who’s having a heart attack. Someone was just wheeled in— _wheeled_ —with a bloody towel wrapped around their fist. It looks like the aftermath of a grisly tree-trimming accident.

“See that guy?” Andy says. “Look how fast the towel is soaking through. I bet that’s two, maybe three fingers—gone.”

Patrick feels woozy and hot. It’s his fault Joe is hurt—his fault, and Pete’s, for being so fucking distracting—and if he ends up as rough as Santa Seven-Fingers over here, Patrick is going to die of guilt. He’ll run away to a convent and live out the rest of his life in ascetic penance. He will be the only nun who draws eyeliner tears on every day, to symbolize his great remorse. Patrick is panicking, possibly. Patrick is experiencing what his high school therapist called _a flight of ideas._

Pete is sticking his tongue out at Andy. His tongue is so pink, so—suggestive—that Patrick forgets all about habits and hail Marys. Pete says, “Is this about the Christmas tree again? Because I keep telling you, I had nothing to do with it. Patty wanted a real one, and BAM! Christmas miracle! One appeared.”

“If you didn’t hack it down with my Boy Scout hatchet on the side of some godforsaken highway, risking your fingers and by extension our band, and in _flagrant_ disregard of environmental law,” Andy asks, with the aspect of someone building up steam they are prepared to use to fuel a long, passionate rant, “then why won’t you tell us where it came from? And why can’t I find my hatchet?”

Pete raises an eyebrow. “I can’t say too much,” he says, aloof. “The Evergreen Investigation Bureau may be listening.” His face says _you are being ridiculous_.

Andy’s face, and voice, say back, “I want my hatchet. You are not qualified to operate that hatchet. You aren’t even qualified to operate the merit badge that _signifies_ the qualification to operate—”

Just then Joe breaks up the argument by throwing up into his own lap.

*

Apparently, vomit is grosser than blood and that’s just universal, because once Joe yaks on himself the triage nurses are pretty keen to get him out of gen pop and into his own room.

A tall, tired nurse takes them into a little room and seats Joe on a bed. She raises an eyebrow when all three of them troop into the room on his heels. “You all family?” she asks skeptically.

“Yes,” Andy says firmly.

“We are related,” Pete adds in an obvious lie, grabbing Patrick by the arm. Pete is not picky about excuses to grab Patrick. People are usually surprised to find out that Pete’s not much of a talker, but for all that he’s the charismatic frontman of their struggling little band, he lives in fucking horror of conversating. He uses Patrick as his small-talk shield whenever possible. He communicates much better by touching, even if it means his message sometimes gets lost along the way.

Patrick squirms in Pete’s grip. He clearly wants to denounce the claim of blood relation but doesn’t want to risk being kicked out of the exam room. He compromises by scowling while the nurse gets to work on Joe. She shines a light in his eyes; she asks him to count backward by 7s; she gets him to stand on one foot, then another. “Tap the bed every time I say the letter O,” she instructs, then reads off a long list of letters. Joe, apparently transfixed by a water stain on the ceiling, doesn’t tap even once.

Pete’s not sure how these tests are scored but from here, it seems like Joe’s not getting an A.

“I’ll get a doc in here, but I think we’re gonna need a CT scan,” the nurse says at last, frowning.

“S’that hurt?” Joe asks. This is the first indication of paying attention he’s made in a while.

The nurse sits on the edge of the bed for a moment. “No, it doesn’t hurt. It’s just an x-ray of your head. Seems like you’ve got a concussion, but we have to make sure it’s not worse.”

“Is it ‘spensive?” Joe asks next. The nurse looks taken aback. Joe crosses his arms over his chest with notable clumsiness. “They’re useless layabouts,” Joe says, pointing at his friends with his chin. “I’m the _breadwinner_.”

“Hey! I have a job,” Andy defends himself. “I’m a delivery driver,” he tells the nurse.

“I don’t,” Pete says. “We’re in a band. Our schedule is… hard to schedule.”

“We eat a lot of white rice,” Patrick adds.

“That I pay for,” Joe says.

The nurse finally stops waiting for them to say something actually relevant to clinical care and goes back to flipping through the clipboard of Joe’s vitals. “Look, Joseph, we’ve got your insurance on file. So for right now why don’t you just worry about resting? You three. Keep him awake. If his brain is bleeding, it’s important he stay alert.”

So, you know. No pressure.

*

“Wait, how did I even get hurt?”

Andy and Pete have gone on a coffee machine expedition (the nurse said to keep Joe awake, she didn’t say they shouldn’t use caffeine to do it) and Patrick is alone with Joe.

And his guilt.

His guilt is a significant presence in the room.

“Do you… not remember?” Patrick asks.

Joe, pallid and with dried blood still in his eyebrow, starts to shake his head and then stops, grimacing. “Ow,” he says quietly. Then: “Remember being in the apartment… Andy found out the cookies were vegan, started just _stuffing_ them into his mouth… Really traumatic, watching the cookies disappear…”

Joe sounds spacy, disorganized, far away. “Joe, that was _two days ago_ ,” Patrick says, horrified. “That’s the last thing you remember?”

Joe’s eyelids flutter, his face tragic. “Didn’t the nurse say that the worse the retrograde amnesia is, the worse my prognosis is?”

Patrick could puke, he really could. He is stuffed with, frozen by, wracked with terrible guilt.

And he realizes Joe doesn’t remember whose fault it is he fell off the ladder.

Patrick has a moment, here. A moment from which he can rewrite history.

Maybe it’s not lying, if it’s just… neglecting to mention?

“Why do you remember what retrograde amnesia means but not what happened with the van,” Patrick groans. “Okay. We were putting Christmas lights on the van? It was actually your idea. And you were putting them on the top, and you… fell off the ladder.”

Joe leans his head back onto his pillow and lets his eyes close. “Oh. Okay,” he says.

There’s a long pause, long enough that Patrick start to worry about the snooze risk. Then Joe cracks an eyelid and asks, pitifully, “Do you think my brain is bleeding _right now_? How bad do you think the damage is gonna be on the x-ray?”

By this point Patrick has sweated all the way through his undershirt and button-down and is working his way through his winter coat. “I think you’ll be just fine,” he says. It’s meant to be comforting, but his voice comes out in a whisper. He stares at his own hands because he can’t look at Joe.

*

Joe seems worse than ever when they get back with the coffee. He’s flushed, flopping around on the rumpled sheets, volunteering out-of-order gibberish. Pete’s starting to get really concerned when, _finally_ , someone with an M.D. appears.

It’s a harried-looking medical resident in a too-large set of scrubs. Pete, Patrick, and Andy mob him all at once, talking over each other to report their observations on the last thirty minutes of Joe’s symptom progression.

“Guys! Guys. If you let me examine the patient, this will be much faster,” the resident tells them.

“What are your credentials?” Andy asks, his arms crossed over his chest. He’s still positioned between Joe and the doctor.

The resident blinks at Andy, a small pained sort-of smile in the corner of his mouth. “Yeah, sure, that’s not insulting,” he says. “I studied at Rush University’s medical school. It’s one of the best in the country. And now I’m here, with your buddy’s life in my hands. If you wanted to move?”

Just then, Joe erupts into an enormous groan. “How are you feeling?” the resident asks him, sidestepping Andy.

Joe’s eyes flutter open and closed. “Patrick!” he cries feverishly. “Have you told Pete?”

“Told… Pete?” Patrick echoes.

The resident tries to approach Joe with his stethoscope but Joe flops out of reach. “About your dire, reprehensible feelings!”

Patrick has gone quite still. “Aren’t you too concussed to use words like _reprehensible_ ,” Patrick asks through gritted teeth.

“There’s nothing like a mild concussion to make you say stuff out loud you usually wouldn’t!” says the resident brightly.

Pete, meanwhile, has lost control of his motor cortex so entirely, he might as well be the one with a brain bleed. He’s definitely entered what counts as the doctor’s personal space. He keeps placing hands on the resident’s shoulders, and the doc keeps sliding them off. “Shouldn’t he be encouraged to get it off his chest?” Pete asks. Even he can hear that his voice is too intense. “If his brain is bleeding, we don’t know how much longer he’s got! We should definitely not stand in the way of any _dire, reprehensible confessions to Pete_. Like, if this is Joe’s last night on earth, I just feel like we’ll really regret—”

“Whoa, no one’s dying tonight!” the resident says. He has that prey-animal look of wanting to get the hell away from Pete. He sidesteps behind the vitals cart like it’s a shield. “No one in this room, anyway. It _is_ the E.R. But even before the CT, I can tell you Joe is probably out of the woods—with a mild traumatic brain injury, the worst of the symptoms are going to resolve within the first few days. That means it’s all uphill from here. The real concern now is how long the cognitive complications—the disorientation, the disinhibition, the incoherence—and the neurological symptoms—the headaches, the light sensitivity—persist.”

Pete is not convinced Joe isn’t going to bleed out through his ears. “But just in case. The confession?”

“He seems pretty coherent to me,” Andy puts in.

“So, uh, to be clear. No one’s potential negligence in this situation is going to kill him? Joe is—he’s definitely going to live?” Patrick asks.

Pete abandons his pursuit of the resident and clutches Joe instead, who is moaning loudly and kind of shimmying on the hospital bed. “Joe, buddy?” Pete says. He’s trying to make his voice soft but it’s coming out more deranged that he’d hoped. “I’m here. You can say it.”

“Patrick—Patrick is—” groans Joe.

“YOU CAN’T SAY IT,” Patrick yelps. He throws himself across the room, in the direction of the bed. His face is pure horror. Pete will literally die if Joe doesn’t finish his sentence.

“—desperately in love—”

Pete is sort of cradling Joe’s upper body, trying to get him as close to his ear as possible. His voice is so weak. When Patrick slams into Pete from the side, he drops Joe entirely. Joe flops limply off the side of the bed. Pete catches one of his arms and jerks him back up just before he hits the ground.

“ _YOUR FRIEND HAS A HEAD INJURY!_ ” the resident yells. Everyone looks at him and freezes.

He points at the door. He looks—well, he looks _pissed._ Through clenched teeth, the doctor orders, “Out. Every one of you. Into the hall.”

“But we’re family—” protests Andy.

“He was in the middle of saying—” protests Pete.

“Yeslet’sgetawayfromJoe!” cries Patrick.

The resident forces the door shut behind them.

*

There is silence in the hallway. Silence save for the urgent bustle and beeping of an emergency department.

It is very tense.

Then Pete says, “Is it just me or did it sound like Joe was about to say Patrick was in love with someone?”

“I want more coffee,” Andy announces. It seems like a really just excellent moment to flee the scene of this impending debacle.

“Great, yes, me too,” says Patrick immediately, apparently having the same idea. He sets off down the hall at a brisk clip.

“Guess I could go for some caffeine,” Pete shrugs, following Patrick.

“Awesome. Two sugars in mine, please,” Andy places his order, not moving.

“Wait!” Patrick stops dead, his eyes are wild and white. “Andy! You’re not coming? You have to come.”

“Someone has to wait here,” Andy says sensibly. “For Joe.”

Pete prods Patrick in the back. “C’mon,” he says. “I’m not finished questioning you yet. Good thing it’s a long walk to the cafeteria…”

Andy does nothing to intervene as Pete frogmarches a panicked Patrick away.

Andy has always liked silence.

*

The cafeteria is decorated for Christmas. It is the least cheerful thing Patrick has seen in his life. Little trees with plastic, holographic branches: green ones, silver ones, red ones. They are hung with tiny, halfhearted ball ornaments. Their Christmas spirit is wholly bankrupt. Worse yet are the lights strung up around the room: strings half-flashing, half-burnt out. Patrick assumes the parallel to patient prognosis is unintentional.

Even the windows are fogged with fake snow spray. As if Chicago residents need more opportunities to think about _snow_.

Patrick catalogues the cafeteria trimmings because his only other option is listening to Pete.

“Okay, so here’s the shortlist of people you might be in love with,” Pete is saying while they wait in the checkout line with their cups of crappy coffee. Patrick decides to count burnt bulbs, as loudly as possible, inside his own head.

“—my sister, the across the hall neighbor, Joe’s cousin Randy, that guy over there in the scrubs—”

“You’re naming over 50% dudes,” Patrick points out, listening in spite of himself.

Pete eyes him sideways, taking an innocent sip of his coffee. “Should I not be? And like. Which way should I adjust the percentage?”

Patrick’s face is _so red_. He can _feel_ it. All the blood in his body is congregating in this one, terrible spot. “You can’t just ask people what percentage gay they are,” Patrick mumbles, looking anywhere else. “It’s—it’s not polite.”

“I guess I was hoping you were at least 50% gay,” Pete says. His voice is quiet. He shrugs one shoulder, glancing away like it’s all very casual.

If Joe survives the night, Patrick is going to _kill_ him. This is _so_ not casual.

Patrick never imagined having this conversation in a hospital. He’s imagined it—a lot of times. So many times. But never as if it would actually _happen_. If you’d asked him two hours ago, he’d have said it was more likely he’d have this conversation with Pete on the fucking _moon_ than ten days before Christmas in the Saint Joe’s cafeteria.

But here they are. Patrick hears himself say, impossibly, “You were hoping?”

Pete is looking away with determination now. “Uh, yeah. I thought that was obvious?”

They reach the register at last, and Pete stuffs money into the cashier’s hand before Patrick can even begin the process of getting out his wallet. “My treat,” Pete mumbles, as if 79¢ is _such_ a gesture. (They’re both unemployed. It kind of is.)

Patrick doesn’t care. Patrick is stuck on the word _obvious_. “Why would it be obvious that you hoped that,” he asks, his voice flat.

Pete makes a noise that can only be described as a chortle. “You can’t be serious,” he says. Then, right here at the end of the cafeteria line, he leans close into Patrick’s personal space and asks, “Patrick Stump, wanna make out?”

Patrick turns twelve different colors, including violet and aubergine. “What?” he sputters.

Pete’s eyes are dark, inscrutable. “Kisses are harder to misunderstand than lyrics, maybe,” he says. “And everything else. Will you let me? Kiss you?”

Patrick, who has obviously suffered a complete break from reality, says, “Uh, okay. But not here.”

*

So they end up in an empty exam room, two cups of rapidly cooling coffee and two boys, clumsy and bursting with heart. Pete propelled himself to this moment on a burst of pure, dumb _want_. He wasn’t thinking about consequences. He wasn’t thinking about what would happen if Patrick said yes. What would happen when they got to this room. What would happen when they got home tonight, concussed Joe and shy, funny Andy between them. What would happen when, having kissed, they tried to carry on being in a band and living in their lives.

Pete hopes Patrick knows he doesn’t just want to kiss him the once.

Pete’s afraid to say it out loud. Pete’s having a hard time producing speech.

Patrick wraps both hands around his coffee and holds it in front of himself like a small, caffeinated shield. He sits on the edge of the hospital bed, looking worried. “Um,” he says. “So like. Who makes the first move?”

Pete shuffles over to Patrick, draws nearer til their knees touch. Patrick sitting on a hospital bed is nearly eye-level with Pete standing, which makes him feel shorter and less suave than ever. “Pawn to E7,” Pete says. “Your move.”

It’s dim in here, the room lit only by the fluorescents from the hallway, but the dramatic shadows give Pete the impression he can see Patrick’s pulse leaping in his throat. “How did your pawn get all the way to E7?” Patrick asks.

“You’re very bad at chess.”

Patrick laughs softly, staring, staring at Pete. His eyes are the color of the sea. “Insult me and then kiss me, is that the plan?”

Pete nudges the toe of Patrick’s sneaker with his own. He feels like he’s drowning. He definitely can’t move. “Your move,” he reminds Patrick.

“You so don’t have a plan,” Patrick decides. “All this time, I thought at least one of knew what we were doing. But you’re just making it up as you go, aren’t you?”

“One head injury at a time,” Pete agrees. He nudges Patrick’s toe again. “Your move?”

Patrick doesn’t close his eyes. He moves towards Pete by slow-motion millimeters. Pete is staring right into the grey ocean of his eyes when the warmsoftsolid of Patrick’s lips brush his.

Pete feels it knife through him, this kiss: lips to gut, his major arteries strobing, his body remade into a conductor for urgent golden light. Pete is irradiated, lit up by the flare of a cosmic sun. Pete is the one getting a CT scan. Pete’s brain is blasted to bits, his heart pulped apart, his lips burned to blisters and precious stones by the heat of it, by the impossible glow.

Just a brush of lips, just a breath of pressure. Patrick pulls back, his eyes wide, his lips parted, his chest pumping with quick and shallow breaths. He holds that coffee like a life preserver, like the sign of the cross—like it keeps his head above water and keeps Pete off of him at once.

“Checkmate?” Patrick asks.

Pete nods numbly, dumbly. Patrick has alchemized him into pure gold, bones and skin. He will never need to breathe again. “The king is yours,” Pete murmurs, barely coherent. He is made of fire. His life depends on kissing Patrick again. He floats forward on the shockwave of his own heart. He closes his eyes this time, finding Patrick’s mouth and following it. Pete kisses soft at first, skittish, waiting for Patrick to pull away; but Patrick meets him in the middle. Patrick presses back. The kiss deepens. Time skips and slips. There is an urgency to Patrick’s tongue, the same cleverness that animates Pete’s lyrics evoking strange new feelings from the bottom of Pete’s bones. He never thought he’d feel this way. He never thought—

“Oh! Shit!” Patrick cries, his mouth shining and slick and popping free of the kiss. He is leaned back on his elbows, Pete crowding over him on the hospital bed. Pete becomes aware that his crotch is hot and wet. His legs. His shoes?

“The coffee,” Patrick says, breathing heavy. “It’s all over you.”

Pete glances down at himself, jeans soaked with hotter liquid than he’d prefer, shoes splashing in a puddle of muddy brown water. Then a smile twists his lips and he shrugs. “No reason to hold back, then,” he says. He drops his own coffee unceremoniously to the floor, where it splashes over his already soaked feet and legs, and presses his mouth into Patrick’s. Patrick grabs him by the belt and helps haul him up onto the bed.

*

“Patrick,” Joe says, squinting up at his friend while Andy navigates Joe’s wheelchair down the corridor. “Do I have a head injury, or is that a _hickey_ on your neck?”

Patrick slaps his hand over his neck like there’s a mosquito on it, which more or less confirms that it’s a hickey. He stares straight ahead, his cheeks and chin pinking furiously, and keeps walking.

“Pete’s got one to match,” Andy pipes up. Joe cranes his neck to peer at Pete, walking behind his chair. Pete looks sheepish and self-satisfied. He pulls up his hood.

“Wait a second,” Joe says. It’s not difficult math. Two idiots, one concussion, two hickeys. “Did you guys _hook up_ while I was _getting a CT scan_?”

“Ummmmm,” says Patrick.

“Would you believe that we both hooked up with two totally different orderlies while you were getting a CT scan?” Pete asks.

“Where’s my orderly?” Andy says. “I didn’t get an orderly.”

Joe crosses his arms over his chest, instantly crabby. “So when I was making a deathbed confession to _punish_ _you_ , I was actually—what. Facilitating a—a smooch-and-grab session?”

“‘Smooch-and-grab session?’” Pete echoes.

“He has a concussion,” Andy defends Joe. “A mild one. But still. It’s swollen in here.” And he pets the top of Joe’s head gently.

“Wait,” Patrick’s saying. “Hold on. What do you mean, punishing me?”

Joe twists in his wheelchair and glares at Patrick fiercely.  “ _The ladder, Patrick. You were supposed to be holding the ladder_.”

“You said you didn’t remember!”

“And you! You acted like you were totally innocent! You _gave me brain damage_ and then you _took advantage of it_!”

Their progression through the hallway has stopped. Andy and Pete are watching with interest. Joe, a big dramatic bandage wrapping his head for the small cut on his forehead, shouts up at Patrick from his wheelchair. Patrick is beet-red and barely able to defend himself.

“You said—amnesia—” Patrick sputters.

“I _lied_!” Joe crows. “And you! You haven’t even _apologized_!”

Patrick looks from friend to friend, waiting for someone to defend him. Pete, whose jeans are stained for some reason, reaches out and grabs Patrick’s hand. “Rickster?” he says. “That’s kind of a dick move.”

Patrick glares at him. “Never kissing you again,” he mutters.

Pete squeezes his hand, grinning happily. He darts in and plants a kiss on Patrick’s mouth. Patrick, of course, kisses back. “Big old liar,” Pete teases, pulling away with a beatific shine coming off him.

“Stop that,” Joe barks. He is so beyond crabby. “No enjoying yourselves. I am _seriously injured_.”

“The doctor said he’s fine,” Andy says at the exact wrong moment. “The CT scan came back clear. We’re just supposed to monitor him for 24 hours. The symptoms should remit in a week or so.”

“Whichever symptoms were actually _real_ ,” mutters Patrick darkly.

Pete elbows Patrick. “C’mon, dude. Apologize to Joe.”

Patrick looks affronted, attacked on all sides. But Joe is not about to let this one go, not when his attempt to punish Patrick through humiliation actually ended up in Patrick getting exactly what he’s wanted for _ever_.

After a long, painful pause, Patrick finally says, “I am really sorry I let the ladder slip while we were putting lights on the van like dumbasses. I’m sorry you got hurt and I’m glad you don’t have permanent brain damage. Um, it was shitty of me to try and get off the hook when I thought you had amnesia. But it was shitty of you to pretend to have amnesia to make me feel even guiltier!”

“I usually end the apology before it turns into accusations,” suggests Andy.

Glowering at all of them, Patrick says, “I’m sorry, Joe.”

Joe feels better already. “I’m very weak from this head injury, you know,” he tells them as they resume their passage down the hallway and towards the big automatic exit doors. “My survival is basically a Hanukkah miracle. You guys will have to be my arms and legs while I recover. I’m in no condition to refill my own drinks or serve my own frozen pizza. I think we can turn the couch into a recovery area…”

Joe goes on, detailing his lengthy and decadent plan for being nursed back to health. Up ahead, Pete and Patrick are holding hands, exchanging significant, sickening looks. Joe predicts more hickeys in the near future. He makes a pretty good matchmaker, he decides. And hey—now that he’s given them the greatest gift of all, true love—Joe can go ahead and keep their Christmas presents for himself.


End file.
